At forty, Dr. Minnow Saint James, “Minn” to his friends, is a gay, metaphysical sleuth who, through Past Life Regression therapy, spans time, space, dimensions, and the entirety of God’s Creation, to discover the past, or future, life origins of his patient’s most challenging present day problems.

But Minn is also a bestselling nonfiction author. His book, In a Past Life, I…. is an international publishing sensation.

Going and Coming is the story of how Dr. Minnow Saint James became the person he is today.

In chapters that alternate between 2007-2008, and 2015-2016, we learn exactly how “Minn” transitioned from an atheist who is a slave to his five physical senses, into a professional metaphysician with a true belief in the Divine Mind we call God.

Readers may find themselves mesmerized as Dr. Saint James hypnotically regresses Ramona Burford, a student volunteer at the UCLA’s Parapsychology Lab, to a past life where, she describes everything that happens from a person’s physical death in one life, until they are reincarnated in a new body. Many readers will be surprised to learn that Pearly Gates, Judgment, Heaven and Hell, have nothing to do with what really happens.

In addition to reincarnation and the eternal nature of the personality, readers, along with “Minn,” explore metaphysical concepts including Simultaneous Time, and the erroneous physical beliefs in sickness, sin, and death.

Along the way, Going and Coming may just shatter your strongest beliefs about the very nature of reality.

The UCLA Parapsychology Lab

By Christopher Stone

In 2007, Dr. Minnow (Minn) Saint James, the protagonist in my just-published novel, Going and Coming: The Minnow Saint James Metaphysical Adventures, Book One, was an atheist, and Skeptic-in-Chief, as regards all things metaphysical. For Minn, at the time a traditional Hypnotic Regression therapist, nothing was real unless it could be perceived by one of his five physical senses.

Minn gleefully mocked those with so-called New Age, metaphysical, and spiritual beliefs. In Dr. Saint James’s pragmatic hazel eyes, all such beliefs were nothing more than hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo: the desperately wishful thinking of those unable to face the fact of their own mortality.

Then, in the summer of 2007, during a session with a new patient who was also a close friend, something happened that turned Minn’s worldview, inside out and upside down. What happened during his session with television series star, Diana Hughes, forced Dr. Saint James to question the core beliefs with which he had created his life.

Here’s what happened. Dr. Saint James attempted regressing his Auntie Diana to her early years, hoping to discover the childhood or adolescent origin of a present-day phobia. But after she was regressed, Diana denied being herself. She claimed to be an Eighth Century teenager in Mexico’s historic Yucatan – one carrying on a forbidden love affair with her brother.

Furthermore, Auntie D described her physical death in the Eighth Century, but she insisted that her God-created real self, the spiritual one, survived physical death.

Minn was horrified, shocked, and unable to believe, explain, or brush away his patient’s past life claims.

Eventually his frantic quest to disprove past lives and reincarnation, led Dr. Saint James to experiment with student volunteers, at the officially nonexistent UCLA Parapsychology Lab, or simply, The Lab, as it is more commonly known.

But the UCLA Parapsychology Lab is not a creation of my fiction. It exists; and it is alive and well, although officially, the university insists that The Lab was closed permanently, back in 1978.

In truth, The Lab can be found hiding in plain on the fifth floor within the former Neuropsychiatric Institute [NPI] (now the Semel Institute) at UCLA’s Center for the Health Sciences. In many ways, The Lab, officially shut down in 1978, after way too much media attention was paid to what was happening within, was a clearinghouse for various researchers and scientists to visit and share data, conduct their own research or participate in the university’s.

Dr. Thelma Moss, a clinical psychologist by training, headed The Lab back in the days when it was a known and acknowledged entity on campus, 1967-1978. She initially began conducting studies of extrasensory perception (ESP), hypnosis, healing, alternative medicine, and the investigation of hauntings and poltergeists. Dr. Moss received great accolades and academic respect for her pioneering research efforts and the contribution she made to the neonatal science of parapsychology.

Thelma was a brilliant, accomplished and dedicated medical psychologist and parapsychologist. But she didn’t really understand that the times required that a spotlight not be thrown on The Lab, and its goings on.

Many things led to the demise of our lab, but chief among them was the intense, unwanted media attention given to it, and to its experiments by the Los Angeles Times, and by local Los Angeles television stations.

Although The Lab was officially closed in 1978, the doors reopened, unofficially, of course, five years later, and paranormal experiments continue to this very day.

In Going and Coming, Dr. Saint James experiments with eleven student volunteers, confident that he will be able to discredit past lives and reincarnation, once and for all time.

But the results of his experiments thwart his intent: instead of discrediting past lives and reincarnation, his work confirms them. Each and every one of his eleven student volunteers is able, under hypnosis, to vividly recall other lives they have led, in other places and times.

Eventually Minn has no choice but to believe that past lives and reincarnation are real, and he begrudgingly accepts that he has been naïve to believe that all of Creation can be perceived by the five physical senses.

I was born and raised in Beverly Hills, California, amid swimming pools, movie stars, and private schools. My parents are Sheila and Russell Saint James. Father owns and operates Saint James Cadillac, six highly successful Cadillac dealerships in the San Fernando Valley. Mother, known simply as She to one and all, is Lady Bountiful to Beverly Hills at large, conceiving and coordinating many of its most prestigious charity events.

A youthful forty, I now live and work in Hermosa Beach, California, one of Los Angeles County’s loveliest South Bay beach cities.

Minnow, now there’s a moniker you don’t hear every day. That is, unless you happen to be me. Jokes about my first name haunted my school years. But these days, when people speak of Dr. Minnow Saint James, there’s no mention of his quirky first name. They talk about my professional achievements: You see, nowadays, I have a wildly successful practice as America’s leading Past Life Regression therapist, and I’m also the founder of the Institute for Mental Health Through Past Life Regression Therapy, -now an international organization – with my friend and former professor, Dr. Adrian Finkelstein, as the Institute’s CEO.

But what exactly is a Past Life Regression therapist? I am in the business of going and coming – that is, going into my patients’ past, and sometimes future, lives through hypnotic regression, and coming back with the other life origins of their present life challenges.

My work is cutting edge and evolutionary. Let me put it this way: medical marvels such as artificial limbs, Titanium plates and other metal joints, and pacemakers, have already transformed humans from biological organisms into creatures that are biological and technological hybrids.

Similarly the science of psychology, will soon come to understand the necessity of treating the individual’s entire mental gestalt – including what we think of as past, and even future, lives – in order for the person to achieve mental health.

In my practice, I’ve been treating that entire gestalt for the past seven years. I’m the future of good mental health; science’s better way and brighter tomorrow. But to Psychology Today, and to most of the mental health community, the jury is still out on past life regression therapy, and so they claim my work is not science based.

Nonetheless my success rate, in excess of eighty-five percent, not only speaks for itself; it is the envy of the “scientifically sound” therapies. My services are sought out by people from all walks of life, and from all over the world. My private practice has a six-month waiting list.

Quite simply, while Mother is the go-to woman for Charitable Beverly Hills, I’m the guy ya gonna call when you believe the challenges of your current life may be rooted in a past, or future, one. Often my therapy represents the last, best hope of patients who have tried and failed to achieve mental health through traditional treatments.

The profession has many perks. For one, it is much easier dealing with other people’s issues than with your own. I have a good excuse, if not a good reason, for leaving my own challenges and shortcomings unexamined.

That is how I’m able to avoid pesky questions. Questions such as: Why, at forty-years-old, am I without a spouse, a boyfriend, or even the steady hook-up? I like to think the lack of romance in my life, and the absence of booty in my bed, are products of the spiritualization of my thought, gained in the eight years since my personal transformations. That is what I like to think. The truth may vary.

Born in Bronx, New York, and raised in Fresno, California, Christopher Stone’s early years were dominated by school, watching television and motion pictures, bicycling, skating, and reading avidly. Summers were spent swimming, and doing whatever it took to survive the oppressive San Joaquin Valley heat. But he also remembers fondly the yearly summer trips to New York, to visit family and friends – and to see Broadway shows.

Christopher left Fresno, for Hollywood, California, during his college years after being accepted into the Writers Guild of America’s Open Door Program, a two-year, scholarship, training ground for aspiring screen and television writers. As it happened, rather than a teleplay or screenwriting gig, his first professional writing job was in journalism – as the Los Angeles Editor for Stage Door, at that time, Canada’s equivalent of the U.S. entertainment trade weekly, Variety.

Christopher would later use his Writers Guild of America training to co-author and sell the original screenplay, The Living Legend, with Jon Mercedes III, to the Erin Organization, and later, and also with Mercedes, to write two seasons of The Party Game, a Canadian TV game show.

As a young freelance entertainment journalist, he contributed to many Los Angeles-based publications, among them The Advocate, for which he wrote a breezy film column, “Reeling ‘Round,” and the Los Angeles Free Press. During this time, he became a member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle.

Christopher dipped his toes into the world of motion picture advertising and publicity, as assistant to the West Coast Director of Advertising and Publicity for Cinerama Releasing Corporation, in Beverly Hills. At the same time, he also did special advertising and publicity projects for 20th Century-Fox. Christopher went on to become an Account Executive for David Wallace & Company, a public relations firm specializing in entertainment accounts – and located on West Hollywood’s legendary Sunset Strip.

Returning to his first love, writing, Christopher became a full time freelance contributor to national consumer publications including Us, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, McCall’s, In Cinema, and The National Enquirer, among others. Many of his stories were syndicated worldwide by the New York Times Syndication Corp.

Another important area of endeavor for Christopher Stone was Re-Creating Your Self. A Blueprint for Personal Change that he first developed for himself, the journalist went on to teach the principles and processes of Re-Creating Your Self to others – first, in private sessions, later, in workshops and seminars, and, finally, for California State University Extended Education. Eventually, one of his students suggested he write a book version.

Re-Creating Your Self was first published in hardcover by Metamorphous Press, and subsequently published in a trade paperback edition by Hay House. It has since been published in Spanish, Swedish and Hebrew language editions.

When not writing, Christopher used his longtime interest in, and study of, metaphysics, to teach meditation and psychic development classes – first in Beverly Hills, then later, in Manhattan Beach.

He went on to co-author, with Mary Sheldon, four novellas for a Japanese educational publisher, and then, also with Mary Sheldon, the highly successful The Meditation Journal trilogy of hardcover books. Subsequently, he returned to journalism, this time, contributing hundreds of print and online entertainment features, columns and reviews to magazines and websites. For eight years, Christopher was the Box-office Columnist for MatchFlick.com, a popular online motion picture site.

In his private life, Christopher Stone met David M. Stoebner on May 17, 1994, and they have been together ever since. In 2008, they were married in Los Angeles.

They share a home with their three pets in Coastal Los Angeles County.

In 2013, Christopher’s pet project has been transforming their rarely used kitchen table area into a killer, retro 1950s Diner Nook, complete with a 1952 Seeburg Table Top jukebox, a neon diner sign, and a malt machine.

Christopher’s first novel, Frame of Reference was e and print published, in fall 2012, by MLR Press. A short story, Sweet Homo Alabama was published by MLR Press, December 19, 2012.

Stone spent much of 2013 writing Frame of Reference 2: The Dark Side of Stardom, a sequel novel to Frame of Reference, as well as, Abracadabra, and a short story, published at Halloween. But the indefatigable scribe also found time to contribute weekly reviews, columns and interviews to Queer Town Abbey.

On December 11, 2015, Christopher will introduce readers to the Past Life Regression therapist, Dr. Minnow Saint James, the subject of his new series, The Minnow Saint James Metaphysical Adventures, in the Christmas short story, Shaking the Holiday Blues Away, MLR Press. Going and Coming: The Minnow Saint James Metaphysical Adventures, Book 1, will be released by MLR Press, January 22, 2016.